His research interests revolve around medieval art and architecture in Europe and the Latin East. He has published widely on Gothic architecture and sculpture in France and the Greek-speaking world, including a monograph on church building in Lusignan Cyprus.
Since the s, the papal collegiate church of Saint-Urbain at Troyes has been viewed as the product of two visually distinct building campaigns headed by different architects, the first exemplifying mid-thirteenth-century French Rayonnant architecture and the second embodying or presaging late medieval Flamboyant aesthetics. It attempts to demonstrate that matching specific sets of forms to undocumented individual architects is not as straightforward as hitherto thought, and that the choice of visual language was ultimately predicated as much on funding as on patronal intentions.
Instead of viewing Saint-Urbain as the product of a straightforward evolutionary design process unfolding from Rayonnant to proto- Flamboyant forms in the course of a couple or more decades, it will make the case for a non-linear formal progression predicated on the practical realities prevailing at the chantier and the weight of patronal intentions and decisions. The Saint-Urbain project was inaugurated in the spring of , when Urban IV requested of the Benedictine nuns of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains to sell to his procurators his paternal residence, ceded them in the past for the sake of the souls of his parents and friends, along with other adjacent property, for the site to be used in building the new church.
That these provisions probably meant that the Saint-Urbain choir was by then ready to receive its occupants is confirmed by a couple of indulgences for visitors to the church on the day of its future dedication and on the feast of Saint Urban, issued later that same year. However, a series of unforeseeable vicissitudes and financial disasters befell the project thereafter, forestalling progress and jeopardizing its timely completion. A devastating fire swept through the east end of the edifice in the mids, causing grave damage to its structure, which thus necessitated extensive and costly repairs.
In its present state, the collegiate church of Saint-Urbain at Troyes constitutes a three-aisled rib-vaulted basilica of relatively modest dimensions fig.
